Author: camhsdigital

CAMHS.Digital are excited to offer children and young people (13-25 yrs) the chance to get involved in our work and join us as Citizen Researchers!

Workshops will run every 4-6 weeks at the University of Manchester (Travel expenses will be reimbursed). The workshops will involve discussions around developing new digital health innovations (e.g. mobile phone apps, virtual reality, etc), mental health and data sharing. You do not have to attend every single session to be part of the group.

Being part of the Children and Young People’s Digital Research Advisory Group you can:

– Work with academic & NHS researchers and develop new research skills

– Become part of a group of ‘experts’ in digital mental health

– Get to experience state-of-the-art technology

– Meet new people

– Improve the mental health of others- now and for the future

– Have something unique to put on your CV / university applications

Our first workshop will be on WEDNESDAY 23rd OCTOBER at 4.30-5.30pm

For more information please email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

This week we joined the Health Action Champions group at the Greater Manchester Youth Network to run a mSootheBox workshop. We presented the aims of the projects and talked about some of the ideas from our previous workshops. The group had a go on the prototype and gave valuable feedback on what they liked about the design and what could be done to improve it.

We will continue working on the mSootheBox app project until November 2019! This means you still have time to check out the first prototype of the app and give us your opinions on it. Future workshops will be announced shortly and everyone who takes part will receive a £20 shopping voucher as a thank you!

If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved, please email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

Yesterday, we held the third workshop to design mSootheBox – our new Augmented Reality (AR) app based on the use of safe distraction techniques, which is aiming to help young people who self-harm. Oldham Youth Council kindly invited CAMHS.Digital and Sparta Digital to run the workshop at their local centre.

Firstly, we reminded the group of the aims of the project and what had been discussed in the first 2 workshops.

Sparta Digital were able to use a lot of the ideas from the previous workshops and build it into a single app! They presented the first wire frame of the mSoothebox app to the group.

Following the presentation by Sparta Digital, we had a Q&A session. There were some really constructive ideas and conversations about the colour, AR features and ways to make the app suitable for different ages. The group also came up with even more innovative ideas that could be added to the mSootheBox app!

In our final workshop on we will be asking for more people to share their views – Thursday 25^th July at 12.30-1.30pm, University of Manchester.

If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved, please email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

Are you aged 16-25 and keen to make a difference to young people’s mental health? If so, CAMHS.Digital are thrilled to offer you the chance to get involved in a new digital project!

CAMHS.Digital want your help to design a new mobile app: mSootheBox. mSootheBox aims to help children and young people to manage self-harm behaviours using Augmented Reality (AR) technology. You can read more about the mSootheBox project here.

We are inviting young people to develop the app in interactive workshops. No knowledge of self-harm is necessary to take part, but by being involved you will have the chance to:

• Share your views on mental health and apps
• Design the mSootheBox app
• Work with industry digital experts – Sparta Digital

Our third workshop will be held on Thursday 27th June at The University of Manchester, from 5.30 – 6.30pm.

If you would like to get involved, email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

We recently held the second workshop to design mSootheBox – our new Augmented Reality (AR) app based on the use of safe distraction techniques, which is aiming to help young people who self-harm. The workshop was attended by young people aged 16-25 years, and jointly led by industry experts from Sparta Digital, who had been working hard to develop the ideas produced in Workshop 1.

Sparta began by recapping the first workshop and reminding the young people of the four key concepts they had come up with. These were:

1. ‘AR Pet’ (pictured) – where a user would look after/play with/exercise a virtual pet in the users real environment
2. ‘Walking stories’ – which would encourage a user to exercise whilst completing a story
3. ‘Customisable Environment’ – which would create an AR environment of things that make a user happy e.g. images, objects etc.
4. ‘My happy place’ – which would allow users to upload/share a personalised ‘happy place’, placing it on a map and adding songs, notes etc. for other users to find

Working in groups, the young people chose their favourite concept and created a ‘Paper Prototype’, designing how they would like the app to look, different screens, its features etc. in much more detail. After presenting their ideas to the rest of the group and discussing each one, the young people were then asked to consider how much customisation they would like to see in the app, such as being able to change the colours, logo or name. It was clear that everybody had different preferences for these options, so it is definitely something that needs to be considered in the final design!

Once again, we had a fantastic and very creative workshop, and everyone was very impressed with the ideas produced. In Workshop 3 the young people will finalise the protoypes, and think more about how AR could be used in the app.

If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved, please email us at Camhs.Digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

Are you aged 16-25 and keen to make a difference to young people’s mental health? If so, CAMHS.Digital are thrilled to offer you the chance to get involved in a new digital project!

CAMHS.Digital want your help to design a new mobile app: mSootheBox. mSootheBox aims to help children and young people to manage self-harm behaviours using Augmented Reality (AR) technology. You can read more about the mSootheBox project here.

We are inviting young people to develop the app in interactive workshops. No knowledge of self-harm is necessary to take part, but by being involved you will have the chance to:

• Share your views on mental health and apps
• Design the mSootheBox app
• Work with industry digital experts – Sparta Digital

Our next workshop will be held on Thursday 13th December at The University of Manchester, from 5.30 – 7pm.

If you would like to get involved, email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.

Yesterday, we held our first workshop with young people to design mSootheBox – a new Augmented Reality (AR) app to help young people who self-harm. The workshop was a great success and it was wonderful to see how every young person got really involved and came up with some fantastic ideas!

We started by asking the young people to tell us about the different things they do to feel happy, or to distract themselves when they are feeling down. They came up with lots of great ideas – some of the most common were reading, playing with a pet, going for a walk or thinking about places they’d like to visit in the future (see image).

Sparta Digital then showed us a range exciting AR apps, and explained to us just a few of the ways AR can be used to help us to interact with our environment. In small groups, the young people thought about how AR could be combined with the distractions they use to feel happy, and how this could be translated into an app. Again, the young people had some really brilliant and very creative ideas, and brought up lots of interesting points that we will need to think carefully about in our future app designing workshops.

We can’t wait to build on these ideas at our next workshop on 13^th December. If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved, please email us at camhs.digital@gmail.com or fill in this form to find out more.